Google's Clickless Era (axios.com) 52
For the first time last month, a majority of all browser-based Google searches resulted in zero clicks, according to a new study from software company Sparktoro. From a report: The report's author notes that Google's functionality has changed to keep users within the Google ecosystem, not to always refer them outside of it. "We've passed a milestone in Google's evolution from search engine to walled-garden," he writes. On mobile, where the majority of search traffic takes place, organic searches have fallen about 20%, and have instead been replaced by paid searches and "zero click" searches, or search queries that result in snippets of information being presented, removing the need for a user to click into a link. In January 2016, the report notes, more than half of mobile searches ended without a click. Today, it's almost two-thirds.
Hard to tell what it means without more data (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I use Google for is spell checking. I type in a word I know is misspelled, but the system spell-checker can't seem to figure out the correct spelling for, and pretty much always Google will know what I meant and present me with the correct spelling...
So while that's technically an example of a zero-click scenario, it doesn't indicate Google had drawn me deeper into its infrastructure, it just means I found a way to extract information from it.
If a whole bunch of other people started doing something like that, it could account for some of that zero click increase....
On the other hand another thing I'll use Google for is to look for weather in other cities I'm planning to visit, and there I have to admit the presentation of a summary of the weather in a place I was checking for is often enough, and has resulted in fewer clicks to weather underground (or other weather sites) than in the past.
I should probably try to make it a point to just open weather underground first, rather than giving Google even more data about me...
Re: Hard to tell what it means without more data (Score:2)
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So while that's technically an example of a zero-click scenario, it doesn't indicate Google had drawn me deeper into its infrastructure, it just means I found a way to extract information from it.
I'd argue the opposite. It's exactly what Google wants, but it was relatively cheap to implement... all they had to do was assemble a giant database of every word, brand, and trademark in use (in real, fictional, conversational, and technical contexts), rank them by probability of being used, then instantly compare those to the garbled mess of glyphs you put in the search query.
I should probably try to make it a point to just open weather underground first
In return for that trivial exercise, Google does indeed keep you in its ecosystem. Google is still your go-to search tool, to the e
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Re:Hard to tell what it means without more data (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand another thing I'll use Google for is to look for weather in other cities I'm planning to visit, and there I have to admit the presentation of a summary of the weather in a place I was checking for is often enough, and has resulted in fewer clicks to weather underground (or other weather sites) than in the past.
I should probably try to make it a point to just open weather underground first, rather than giving Google even more data about me...
What weather underground needs to do is try to lighten their web pages. I have to really be in a mood to get a bunch of detailed info to make me willing to wait for their pages to finish loading.
I just tried a Google search for weather in some city, and it displayed a synopsis about 1.5 seconds. Weather underground took almost 10 seconds. In my experience, every additional click on that website has a similar latency. Even though it has lots of useful features, it just feels really sluggish.
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There's an app for that. I am using "Clear Skies", which, while being an astronomy-oriented app, gives very good forecast and details about a location.
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Go directly to the source.
NOAA's Weather.gov is a shockingly lightweight page. It does have lots of info, but the 5 day forecast is front and center, and if you want more detail, it's there. And no external ad servers.
Sam
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Unfortunately, whenever I try to look up the meaning of an obscure word, I get ten sites with summaries like "snodilicative - dictionary.example.com / Find definition, meaning, meaning, and examples of snodilicative at example.com".
Or rather, used to, since it looks like it changed recently or I can't remember a sufficiently obscure word.
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Long ago Google said their aim was to become like the Star Trek computer. Ask a natural language question, get a natural language answer. Everyone mocked Siri for responding with "Here's some web site I found about X", when you were clearly trying to avoid having to read the answer.
That evolved a bit but the idea was always to give the user the information they wanted as quickly as possible.
Maybe the newspapers were right. If Google wants to go that route they should offer the sources of all that knowledge
Re: Hard to tell what it means without more data (Score:2)
Maybe Uncle Sam should make Google stop using it's monopoly power in search and cellphone OS to eat everyone else's lunch.
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Break up Big Brother Google. Break up Faceboot. Smash the Sandhill Road money cartel. Decentralize, democratize. Restore competition and innovation.
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local tools (Score:3)
One of the things I use Google for is spell checking. I type in a word I know is misspelled, but the system spell-checker can't seem to figure out the correct spelling for, and pretty much always Google will know what I meant and present me with the correct spelling...
You are aware that you can install tools locally such as LanguageTool.org ? (i.e. running your own server locally instead of sending every single of your keystrokes to Google, Grammarly, etc.)
Which is much better than the pre-packaged crap that comes with most OSes, as it's a grammar checker.
usually OSes package some piece of software that looks like aspell and similar: just a giant list of greenlisted words and a few extra spelling rules. They 'correct' spelling simply by looking the few closest match fr
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Often I use Google to look up simple information. More often than not, I will find the information I'm looking for in the summaries on the first page of results. This is convenient for me, but if the site is relying on advertising revenue to fund their activities, it is not good for the long term sustainability of the internet for Google to be externalizing the expense of research while reaping all the advertising revenue for themselves.
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The other times though, I can see Google isn't giving me the kind of links I want and I try a different search engine, no click from me then either.
Those engineers at Google have Done it again! (Score:3)
They have discovered the onmouseover method in HTML!
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Wait till they discover setTimeout() / setInterval() and WebSocket()! They could even wrap all of this inside a google-analytics JavaScript file. I propose calling it: ga.js! /s
Walled garden? (Score:5, Insightful)
Walled garden? Really? Google doesn't let you visit the relevant links which it returns to your query?
Wait, maybe Google hides the sources of the data it fetches from the net? Um, no.
So, what's wrong with getting the correct results right away without wasting time, CPU processing power and bandwidth?
Yes, Google has become an excellent answering machine. Is that their fault?
Sustainable? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, as has been stated above, itâ(TM)s a little hard to know what these specific changes mean without more context
Re:Sustainable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, but "walled-garden" has a specific meaning which does not seem to capture Google's behavior in this instance, at all. If Google hid the source of the data and made it difficult to go there, then the term would be appropriate.
I find that when someone uses way-too-strong allegations for the evidence, the best thing to do is to assume that the allegations are completely false and that the people repeating the allegations have nothing worthwhile to say. It seems to work at least 99% of the time.
Re: Sustainable? (Score:2)
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Sustainable?
You mean, the servers won't be able to keep up? There's certainly no sign of stress in that area.
The programmers? They aren't exactly hurting there either.
As long as the advertising money keeps flowing, Google will do just fine. And last report is that they have billions in cash just sitting around with nowhere to be spent.
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...Google has become an excellent answering machine. Is that their fault?
Yes.
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Indeed - not so much a walled garden as a carefully curated utility garden, designed to keep you from leaving by the the simple (and valuable) expedient of immediately giving you enough of the carrot that you were looking for that you lose interest in chasing the rest.
I'm not certain it's actually any less evil, but it's certainly a much more pleasant and insidious form of it from the user's perspective.
Definitely nothing like a walled garden in implementation. But is there a term for what it is, preferably
Re: Walled garden? (Score:2)
"Yes, Google has become an excellent answering machine. Is that their fault?"
Google is excellent for answering trivia questions. However it is not nearly as useful for searching the web as it was 10 years ago.
Google's search engine is getting steadily worse (Score:1, Troll)
back when I used google (Score:2)
The snippets are actually cool. Metric conversion, random facts, business hours: all of that is very helpful. Especially when the links in the top show worse results. I.e, If I want to convert units, the first result shouldn't be a conversion table that I'll have to use manually.
Actual searches, not so much and I've stopped using it. There is no way to do a truly boolean or verbatim search anymore. Plus top results are gamed. Just try to find a more "normie" thing like the best household appliance. You'll b
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Re: Google's search engine is getting steadily wor (Score:2)
Google has become worse than useless for searching anything news-related.
The other day I wanted to get a broader world perspective on the Hong Kong protests. But all Google would return, for page after page after page, were semi-official news agencies regurgitating the Approved Narrative. Totally manipulated, absolutely worthless search results.
Displayed Results are Rarely Accurate (Score:5, Interesting)
There are clickless results that I get that I can appreciate (for example converting metric to Imperial units) but I've never been happy with the results where Google presents what they feel is the relevant part of the most likely web page - It seems to be correct/complete less than 25% of the time. Many times it looks like the answer has been solved but when you dig into the page you discover that the text Google has presented isn't correct or has assumptions that made what was originally presented invalid.
Maybe it's a step forwards in "AI" and user experience but it's going to take a while for me to trust it.
I suspect that there's going to be a lot of incorrect answers of term papers because the student is too lazy to click and display the presented link.
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Maybe it is time to retire the term "AI" or at least pair it with a twin "ASS" for artificial stupidity. Mechanical inference is not intelligence. AI is salesman-speak for "My machine is somehow smart"
What is this Google you speak of? (Score:1)
Is it that place two blocks from my house in Seattle?
I no longer log in with google if I can help it.
Or Facebook.
Or whatever privacy-stealing app you have.
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oh don't worry, they still track everything you do via their own cookie and 3rd party cookies
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They must not be since I blocked those and started getting captchas everywhere.
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oh don't worry, they still track everything you do via their own cookie and 3rd party cookies
This is where your cell settings and data cleanings work.
Stuff like Spybot
Alternative explanation (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps Google's search results are getting fewer clicks because the results are increasingly irrelevant to what the user is actually trying to find.
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That's easy to test; see if usage of Google is dropping. If so, then your theory is supported and may be true. If not, then your theory is not supported and is probably wrong. (Well, or come up with a complicated reason why people would use Google more when it did not work for them. This would seem to involve people not being lazy and not doing the easiest thing, though, which doesn't match my experience with humanity.)
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That's it
I'll give you an example, take a popular prescription drug that's currently advertised on TV do a google search for information about it. Even though there are few "ad" indicated entries there are a ton of links that surely have the same ad feel.
Either someone's getting to google's secret sauce and top-loading all the results or Google has sold out in other respects that allow such gaming the results.
I think on many generic searches it still works OK, but when it is some big marketing push or issue
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As a regular Google user, I see no evidence of degradation of results. In my experience, they keep getting better. I almost never have to go beyond the first page of results. That's a far cry from the days of Alta Vista, when you often had to keep clicking through the pages until you ran out of results.
What Google Gets Out of This (Score:5, Interesting)
When I RFTA, it looks like they get the click through revenue on the search without the user actually clicking on the site because it was accessed and the data displayed. As a side benefit, the user doesn't leave Google.
If I were an advertiser paying Google for click throughs on the search but not the user clicking into the page, I'd be some angry.
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What click through revenue on the search? Are you suggesting that Google's search results are all paid advertising?
We should be glad for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We should be glad for this (Score:5, Interesting)
In the really old days, the answer to questions about elements was on some page in the .edu TLD, lovingly cared for by a prof, grad student, or somebody otherwise associated with the chemistry department and hosted on some school's server. No ads at all. No BS. Just really good stuff. It was a little bit harder to find. Maybe. Just a few clicks, but it was worth it.
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The only problem was that after a few years that student always moved on, and everything under chem.whatever.edu/~name/ went off to the big /dev/null in the sky. (Kids, ask your parents about the days when storage was expensive) It turned into a great tour of .edu 404 pages.
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For basic factual information it seems better to collect it all together on Wikipedia. As annoying as WP is, it does offer a decent amount of accurate info on many topics with links to other relevant stuff and definitions of terms you might not be familiar with.
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There's one huge problem... (Score:3)
It's great to be able to get default results for a word definition or a historical date directly from Google, without needing to click any of the search links returned.
But whenever I use a Google search to answer a technical question, such as how to use a given function in a smartphone app, Google's own information is almost always out of date. Knowing the exact steps to export Gmail contact information is useless if those steps don't work for the current version of Gmail. To get the right answer, I have to run a time-limited search and then look into the top three or four links returned.
Now why can't the Google default search results do even that?
Taps? (Score:2)
In January 2016, the report notes, more than half of mobile searches ended without a click.
I'll bet all of mobile searches ended without a click.
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I bet not all. Just the vast majority.
There are always weirdos out there...
https://www.technipages.com/co... [technipages.com]
Spellcheck (Score:2)
2/3rds of my google searches are spellcheck. Spellchecks built into the browser, or much worse, phones don't contain jargon or other non-dictionary words. Or, more likely, my spelling is so absurdly bad that a standard spellcheck algorithm just can't figure it out.
A quick pop into google, usually in incognito mode to not pollute chrome's auto-suggestions, and I have my word.
Mobile Clicking is Purposely Crappy and Inaccurate (Score:2)
How many times do you try to close the annoying popup that somehow got past your phone's anti-popup/anti-ad stuff and "somehow" it didn't register your fat thumb on that tiny "x" but instead opened up some stupid ass website that you were trying to avoid. Man I hate browsing on my phone. So probably not the masses, but I for one just avoid clicking shit on my phone because of that sort of fat fingering problem.
Bad results (Score:2)
Many times when I do a search in Google and scroll through what's come back, the stuff listed is nothing to do with what I searched for.
I generally then have to tweak the search terms, or put double quotes around words or phrases, to try to get Google to come back with something actually useful to me.
As a search engine it has actually gotten worse at searching for what I want over the years.
So, yeah, many searches I do result in my not clicking on anything. This isn't a surprise to me, and very very little